Traditional contact centers comprise servers for handling communication types such as telephony and video calls, email, instant messages, and so forth. These communication sessions between agents of the contact center and external parties (customers or callers) can be inbound or outbound. The agents are individuals who are employed or contracted by the contact center to handle these communications in accordance with the business objectives of the contact center management.
The agents are typically connected via workstations over a local area network or wide area network having an interface with public networks (e.g. the Internet or the public switched telephone network or PSTN), and communications sessions with the public networks are usually handled by communications servers or switches. Agent software on the agent workstations interacts with the communications servers to ensure the efficient handling of communications in accordance with workflow procedures executing on the servers or on other computing systems of the contact center. In addition to these basic components, the contact center may also run a web server with which customers may interact and typically will also have one or more media servers for providing services such as music-on-hold and interactive voice response (IVR) technology.
Such contact centers have developed to meet the needs of businesses which wish to provide a channel for interacting with customers or potential customers. For this reason a conventional contact center enlists trained employees to act as its agents, and customers of the company can employ the contact center to speak to an agent and thereby obtain information or assistance in relation to the products of the company.
It is frequently the case that individuals will have a need to seek assistance in relation to products or services which may not be provided by a particular company, or individuals may wish to bypass the mechanisms provided by a company and instead interact directly with other users of the company's products. Individuals often wish to discuss topics of interest which are unrelated to any company or organisation. The expense of current contact center technology makes it most unlikely that any mechanism as efficient as a contact center will exist for such groups of users.
Current technology provides, however, a number of other mechanisms allowing individuals to contact and interact with others having similar interests. The forerunner of many such systems was the networked group of servers known as Usenet, which provided an Internet-based newsgroup system before the advent of the World Wide Web. Usenet is still accessible directly using programs known as newsreaders, or via web interfaces such as Google Groups (formerly deja.com).
Under Usenet, individual message boards are arranged in hierarchies organised under top level areas such as “sci” (for science-related topics) or “rec” (for recreational topics). Thus, for example, topics of interest to physicists would be discussed in the group “sci.physics”, whereas automobile enthusiasts would discuss issues by posting messages to “rec.autos”. News groups can be created in Usenet with any desired degree of granularity for discussing more and more specific interests, such as “sci.physics.relativity”, or “rec.autos.sport.rally”.
Usenet news groups, and many other parallel technologies providing discussion groups or bulletin boards, basically work by allowing users to post text-based messages, sometimes with attachments, into the group. Other users can read and reply to this message. In this way, interested users can assist one another, ask questions, and discuss or argue over topics of mutual interest. Discussions on different subjects are distinguished by the message header which allows messages to be threaded with one another.
The primary advantage of systems such as Usenet is in providing a mechanism for allowing unrelated users to communicate and share knowledge without relying on (or being moderated by) particular companies. However, it will be appreciated that the degree of interaction provided by message board systems is quite inferior to that provided by a contact center. Message board communications are asynchronous, i.e. one must wait for a response without knowing when such a response might be posted and without being able to speak directly to other users to more efficiently direct the discussion.